As part of the EU-project “Civil safety in the Oresund Region” all the involved partners were called to an exercise in Oct. 2004. Partners were all kinds of emergency services in the region from “blue light” to veterinary and local authorities. In a cross-border scenario the focus was the question of how to support the emergency leadership with information that could support the decision making of the crisis management.

The threat towards the Oresund Region came from migratory birds from Siberia. The finding of lots of dead birds and many flu victims at the local general practitioner’s were not immediately connected. Besides, the crisis management set-ups differ between the two countries, Denmark and Sweden. Also in the escalation from being an item of pure veterinary concern to a pandemic, the management differs.

Denmark has different crisis management set-ups or architectures depending on whether the scenario concerns epidemic, atomic emergency or ordinary “blue light” catastrophes. During the exercises it was interesting to examine the transition from an area of veterinary sector responsibility to local police emergency coordination, ending with the pandemic emergency and crisis management set-up.

Although it was obvious that the Geographic Information System (GIS) was beneficial for the decision makers, the exercises made it clear that lots of problems have to be brought into focus if we want to develop or optimise the information and decision support systems in a complex crisis, in this case bird flue.

The enthusiasm dominating many GIS-technical and GIS-emergency people does not always effect the crisis management groups. Education and more exercises will therefore be very useful among the involved partners. For people working in the command room, training of the ability of strategic thinking in relation to creating new data and combinations from the many data bases could be developed as a good investment in future crises.